In many cases, a customer using a travel agency is not absolutely committed to any specific travel plan, but instead may have some flexibility in traveling. One of the services provided by a travel agent is determining whether the customer has any flexibility in traveling and afterwards identifying one or more alternate, low-cost travel arrangements that are available to the customer. For example, a customer who states that he/she would like to fly from Houston to New York on Tuesday, October 8th and return on Friday, October 11th may actually be open to returning on Sunday, October 13th instead, if the cost of traveling would thereby be reduced.
Previously, this process of identifying alternate low-cost travel arrangements could only be performed manually by the travel agent, and therefore was extremely inefficient. More specifically, a travel agent was required to access one or more computer reservation systems to obtain inventory information, such as availability and/or rates, for a plurality of alternate travel arrangements. Then, the travel agent was required to consider any special provisions that would also reduce the price of traveling (e.g., staying over a Saturday night). Since the travel agent could not serve other customers during the above-mentioned steps, the agent's productivity decreased.
Furthermore, even though a travel agent could become more efficient in the process with experience, it could not be guaranteed that the process would always produce all of the alternate, low-cost travel arrangements. In other words, because so much of the prior process required input and/or calculation by a travel agent, the accuracy of the process was extremely susceptible to human error.
Although a prior system for determining low-cost alternate travel arrangements (i.e., the "Bargain Finder" system) is available, this prior system operates on only one computer reservation system (i.e., the SABRE system owned by American Airlines), which does not include information about all of the possible flights between a departure city and a destination city. Consequently, this prior system is not able to consistently find all of the low-cost alternate flights in response to a customer's request.